At this year’s Collision, a tech conference that took place in June in Toronto, Tech Policy Press editor Justin Hendrix had the opportunity to interview two editors about how they think about the problem of disinformation, and how they direct their publication’s coverage of it as an issue. This short podcast installment is audio of the live stage discussion with Betsy Reed, editor in chief of The Intercept , and Matt Kaminski, editor in chief of Politico . Many thanks to Stephen Twomey and the o...
Jul 06, 2022•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast One of the areas where applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence are most fraught with ethical concerns is in law enforcement and criminal justice. To learn more about the opportunities and the concerns, Tech Policy Press spoke to Renée Cummings , who joined the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science in 2020 as the School’s first Data Activist in Residence. In addition to being an AI ethicist, she is also a Criminologist and Criminal Psychologist. ...
Jul 03, 2022•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the age of social media and disinformation, journalists, civil society groups, researchers, and media watchdogs in democracies are figuring out how to band together to create a line of defense against those who seek to sow division and doubt in advance of elections. This week, a French coalition calling itself the Online Election Integrity Watch Group published a summary report on its activities ahead of this spring’s national election there. The group includes entities such as the Alli...
Jun 30, 2022•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode focuses on how best to create mechanisms for outside scrutiny of technology platforms. The first segment is with Brandon Silverman , the founder and former CEO of CrowdTangle, an analytics toolset acquired by Facebook in 2016 that permitted academics, journalists and others to inspect how information spreads on the platform. And the second segment is a panel provided courtesy of the non-partisan policy organization the German Marshall Fund of the United States. On June 15, GMF...
Jun 26, 2022•2 hr 33 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights released a report on YouTube that Tech Policy Press Editor Justin Hendrix helped write with the Center’s Deputy Director, Paul Barrett . YouTube is generally understood to have avoided the scrutiny of journalists, researchers and lawmakers, at least relative to other social media platforms like Facebook. But there is a cost to flying under the radar. To address some of the key issues, this episode features two segments. The...
Jun 19, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast When it comes to visions of the way that technology will intersect with society in the future, Silicon Valley has a near monopoly. It’s been nearly 30 years since Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron published the essay The Californian Ideology , which they say naturalized and gave a “technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures,” a “faith” that is “made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism.” Now, the ...
Jun 14, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast On the Tech Policy Press podcast we talk a lot about the intersection of technology, media and politics. We talk about the flow of information and how political elites, journalists and citizens shape it. There is substantial contrast in how the pieces fit together in China, for instance, compared to the United States. And yet, there are parallels that one might not expect. A recent documentary film explored these issues in the context of a particularly compelling moment in time: the beginn...
Jun 12, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) do not mince words. They say that “climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people.” The quality of the public discourse on climate issues plays a role. A report released by the IPCC in February says that the “[r]hetoric and misinformation on climate change and the deliberate undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of...
Jun 11, 2022•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to simmer, there is a good amount of science emerging about the relationship between the information environment and vaccine uptake. Today we’ll hear from two researchers from different disciplines about their work on social media and vaccine misinformation. First up is John Alexander Bryden , Executive Director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, with whom I discuss the results of some recent research his tea...
Jun 05, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast When it comes to content moderation and the regulation of harmful content on social media, there are various metaphors at play for how to think about doing it. One that we’ve explored on this podcast in the past is to see it as a form of administration, or what legal scholar evelyn douek calls the “rough online analogue of offline judicial adjudication of speech rights, with legislative-style substantive rules being applied over and over again to individual pieces of content by a hierarchical bu...
Jun 02, 2022•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week the Philippine Congress declared Ferdinand Marcos Jr. the winner of the recent election, confirming that he will become the country's next president. Marcos, know by his nickname “Bongbong,” is the son of the late dictator and kleptocrat with the same name, who was president from 1965-1986. Marcos Sr. declared martial law in 1972, a year before his second term was to come to an end, ushering in years of brutality, oppression and poverty in the Philippines. To learn more about the...
May 29, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast For the past six years, an independent research program at New America called Ranking Digital Rights has evaluated the policies and practices of some of the world’s largest technology and telecom firms, producing a dataset that reveals their shortcomings with respect to human rights obligations. Ranking Digital Rights evaluates more than 300 aspects of each company it ranks that fall broadly into three categories: governance, freedom of expression, and privacy. Following the release of this year...
May 25, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast The June cover story for Wired magazine is on a movement in tech that many see as having the potential to rewire not just the internet, but to produce a fundamentally more democratic and equitable society. The story is titled “Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution,” and I had the chance to speak to its author, Wired senior writer Gilad Edelman.
May 22, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast UN human rights experts that chronicled Facebook’s role in spreading hate speech in Myanmar concluded that it played a “determining role” in the genocide against the Rohingya people. Facebook’s own investigation into the situation also found fault with the company’s practices, and made various recommendations for how it should develop a human rights strategy to protect against such things from happening again. Today, we’re going to hear from a refugee from the violence, who is with o...
May 15, 2022•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Researchers Alice Marwick, Benjamin Clancy, and Katherine Furl this week released Far-Right Online Radicalization: A Review of the Literature , an analysis of "cross-disciplinary work on radicalization to better understand the present concerns around online radicalization and far-right extremist and fringe movements." In order to learn more about the issues explored in the review, I spoke to Marwick, who is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hil...
May 13, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Over the past year of publishing this podcast, we’ve looked again and again at the issue of the power of tech platforms in society. Now, there is a book titled The Power of the Platforms: Shaping Media and Society , by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter , just published at the end of last month by Oxford University Press. Justin Hendrix had the chance to catch up with one of the authors about what they learned in writing the book, and the complexities of the subject....
May 08, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you take the time to look at the SEC filings for Meta Platforms, Inc. - the company that operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - you will find various disclosures about its ongoing legal battles. Taken together they reveal patterns, particularly in how the company is led. To get an update on some of the key cases under consideration, from Cambridge Analytica to competition, I spoke with one particularly keen observer of Meta: Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next.
May 01, 2022•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last week at Stanford University, former President Barack Obama gave a keynote address at a Stanford University Cyber Policy Center symposium entitled “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm." This week, many of the issues Obama discussed were brought into sharp relief when it was announced that billionaire Elon Musk will acquire Twitter for the price of $44 billion dollars. For reactions to Obama's speech- and to Musk’s antics- I spoke with David Kaye, Professor of...
Apr 28, 2022•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast There is a growing literature and practice around how to equitably collaborate with traditionally marginalized communities to build better technology. A pair of investigative reports into Worldcoin’s launch may well serve as the basis for an instructive case study in what not to do. The first report , by Richard Nieva and Aman Sethi at BuzzFeed News , was published April 5th. It’s titled Inside Worldcoin’s Globe-Spanning, Eyeball-Scanning, Free Crypto Giveaway: The Sam Altman–founded compa...
Apr 24, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the opening to her book, How to Be A Woman Online, Surviving Abuse and Harassment and How to Fight Back , Nina Jankowicz crafts an allegory of a woman going about her day, encountering creepy and increasingly threatening men in public. It recounts a morning commute on a cloudless morning, but things quickly get dark. The woman endures various encounters: at a coffee shop, on the metro, ultimately at her office. It gets ugly. And yet the point of the story is, this kind of behavior is per...
Apr 21, 2022•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Privacy is one of the fundamental issues in tech policy. And yet, in the United States progress on this issue has been elusive at the federal level, even as Europe has forged ahead with its General Data Protection Regulation or (GDPR) and now the Digital Markets Act, which will reinforce the privacy protections afforded EU citizens under GPDR with new provisions. And yet there are bills before Congress that could change things in the U.S.- such as the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, which ...
Apr 20, 2022•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we hear an account of the prominent role that one Facebook executive has played in US and global politics, making many key decisions that, over the years, have literally been engineered into Facebook and its polices. Our guest is Benjamin Wofford, the author of a WIRED cover story titled The Infinite Reach of Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s Man in Washington: How one man came to rule political speech on Facebook, command one of the largest lobbies in DC, and guide Zuck through disaster—a...
Apr 17, 2022•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Social media tools developed in Silicon Valley can be used for illiberal purposes, often putting the most vulnerable groups at risk. Afsaneh Rigot is a researcher and advocate concerned with issues of law, technology, LGBTQ, refugee and human rights. A senior researcher at ARTICLE 19 with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center and an advisor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard, Afsaneh is the author of the recently published report, Digital...
Apr 12, 2022•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast It might appear that many political and government leaders have come to regard AI as a kind of panacea, right at the moment when the world needs one most. The third and final installment of the sixth UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was published Monday: UN Secretary General António Guterres called the report "a litany of broken promises" and "a file of shame, cataloging the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world." Some leaders appear to be bettin...
Apr 10, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last year, the Journal of Social Computing published a Special Issue on the subject of Technology Ethics in Action . The special issue was the product of the Ethical Tech Working Group at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, which was cofounded by Mary Gray and Kathy Pham. The ideas in the special issue span a range of critical and interdisciplinary perspectives, with essay titles ranging from “Creating Technology Worthy of the Human Spirit” to “Connecting Race to Ethi...
Apr 07, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Proponents and opponents of measures to reform Big Tech are busy this spring on Capitol Hill, and the fight over proposed antitrust regulation, in particular, is heating up in the US Capitol. In this episode we’ll hear two short interviews that provide a window into the effort to influence lawmakers. The first segment is with Drew Harwell , a technology reporter for The Washington Post who shared the byline on a story last week on a campaign by Meta, the company that operates Facebook...
Apr 05, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast If there is to be any accountability for Russian war crimes in Ukraine, it will requires carefully gathered evidence. The collection and preservation of digital media and other evidentiary material in Ukraine is a massive undertaking. It is being met by brave Ukrainian officials and local civil society groups operating in besieged cities and towns, as well as by an international coalition of human rights, open source intelligence and digital forensics researchers. This loose coalition is drawing...
Apr 03, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this year, a nonprofit organization called the TechEquity Collaborative released the results of its Contract Worker Disparity Project , an investigation into the “shadow workforce” that powers many tech firms. The culmination of a year of research into the disparities in contract work, the report features survey data and first-hand accounts from contract workers in tech who describe range of challenging conditions and inequities, particularly relative to the lavish pay and perks that are...
Apr 01, 2022•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this month in The Guardian newspaper, researcher and journalist Jane Lytvynenko wrote: I report on internet disinformation. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it became very personal. There is more than one struggle. There is the war of bombs, the war that’s taking lives. And then there’s the battle over what can be done. Jane, who is presently a Senior Research Fellow on the Tech and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center, grew up in Kyiv. She moved to Cana...
Mar 29, 2022•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Lawmakers around the world want to do something about social media, and in particular content moderation. But what if the interventions they are developing are based on a flawed conceptual framework about how content moderation works, or how it should work? This week I had a chance to talk to one of the smartest legal minds on questions related to content moderation to explore some fresh thinking on the subject: evelyn douek , a Doctoral Candidate at Harvard Law School and Senior Research Fellow...
Mar 27, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast